iTunes Genius and Stuff

I’ve downloaded iTunes 8, mainly because I was a bit interested in Genius. More from a technical perspective than anything else right now, although it may end up replacing Party Shuffle (especially since lately I’ve been skipping tracks lots…)

So, I’ve heard mixed reports about it so far - that it doesn’t work with Classical music, for instance. I can verify that it does, for instance Canon in D major brings up a selection of other classical music. I can’t vouch for how good a job it does, since I’m still somewhat of a naïve listener of classical music.

I do think it’s funny that the Beatles cannot be used for Genius, but for Badly Drawn Boy, it seems to do a pretty good job of choosing similar music. I’m not sure how much is Genre-based, since I have fairly well genre-d tracks.

As for the new UI - I don’t mind it too much. I do miss the view that had the album art and tracks grouped by album, since that was the main view I used, except for when in Party Shuffle.

The Genius Sidebar annoys me a little that it is trying to get me to buy stuff - I think it’s just a rebadging of the Mini store, which I didn’t use anyway. Thankfully, you can turn this off. At least Apple got it right with the explicit asking of permission this time before sending your iTunes library data back to the mothership.